Class strugglers: Revisiting Rorty and co
Catherine Edwards, University of Warwick, UK
Paper presented at SCUTREA, 29th Annual Conference, 5-7 July 1999, University of Warwick
The Communist Manifesto had held that the history of all hitherto existing society was the history of class struggles: freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, and, then, bourgeoisie and proletariat. In this series, however, there was one unspoken regularity: the slaves did not succeed the masters, ….and the journeymen did not triumph over the guildmasters. The lowliest class never came to power. Nor did it seem likely to now. (Gouldner, 1979:93)
Tony Blair wants us all to be middle class…He wants the world to be full of people like him, and frankly I can’t imagine a worse place. (Burchill, 1999)
A sense of urgency around the need to address, authoritatively, a research and teaching agenda for adult and continuing education in the wake of both its precarious (inter-disciplinary) and courted (lifelong learning) positions within HE gave rise, at the 1998 SCUTREA conference, to epistemological debates and justifications for various stances being embraced. Those I was party to took a postmodernist stance or reiteration or reconfiguration of some kind of radicalism (did anyone actually utter the words Marx, marxism or marxian or were they just implied?).
There were some attempts to reach into appropriate philosophical discourses and to make these accessible and debatable through illustration from policy and practice in the education of adults. This paper seeks to return to some of the issues raised, to explore them further and in particular to set illustrative examples within an historical frame, ‘real’ history and the history of ideas, so that they facilitate a critical engagement with the tenor of current government lifelong learning ideology which is set to influence the shapes and spaces made available to adults for learning for the next decade or so.
Rorty’s (1992) critique of Eagleton’s work on Ideology (1991) forms a starting point for the post-modernist-radical debate. Key themes and issues are drawn from a variety of adult learning contexts and practices from the late 1970s to the 1990s. The paper explores the possible relationship between each ‘epistemological stance’ and the shapes and spaces made available to adults for learning for the next decade or so. It looks at the current search for moral purpose, from the engendering of solidarity to the need and respect for difference.
Lifelong learning in the current HE context
One of the core issues in the history of the definition and championing of adult education has always been the extent to which it served a democratising role in the quest to create and maintain a more equal and just society. This has at times been equated with and at other times constrasted with its role of preparing adults for the continual adaptations required to become or remain employable. Adult education can be construed as co-opting learners to existing power relations in society, for example through training to service the commercial and economic requirements of private industry or the state. It can be construed as encouraging dominant power relations to be subverted through the development of critical consciousness and co-option to a particular ideological stance. It can be construed as developing the capacity for critical awareness, creativity and innovation regardless of the specific moral or social purposes or objectives of its perpetrators (educators).
The recent trend in higher and school education towards the application of national criteria and formulae in order to arrive at comparable ‘standards’, together with the expansion of main stream higher education to include a much higher proportion of the population, has provoked the latest version of a crisis of identity, or perhaps crisis of purpose, for many currently engaged in the education and training of adults. The dilemma around the extent to which the knowledge produced, created, gathered or discovered in higher education either can or should be free from the ‘shapes’ of its funders or directed towards the ‘spaces’ they occupy, and conversely, the extent to which the beneficiaries of higher education should directly or indirectly pay for it is not a new dilemma. It has been around at least since Humboldt’s efforts to establish the notion of academic freedom in 1850 (Simpson, 1983:13), a time when, in the sciences at least, universities were being established as the proper training ground for industrial researchers in Germany.
The traditional inter-disciplinary practices and multi-disciplinary subject bases of adult education within Universities, a concomitant of the mission to increase access through responsiveness to diverse learners, is perceived as its weakness and its strength. The current research assessment exercise has re-enshrined the notion of the cognate discipline. It has done this at an historical moment where it is also being claimed that learning across a range of disciplines is essential for any economically viable adult and socially responsible citizen. In the ensuing ‘fight’ what is emerging is a predictable hierarchy of a ‘new’ old-style elite who will be recruited to ‘deepen disciplinary knowledge’ and a variously privileged, or not, mass of educators and self-directing learners who get to ‘learn less about more’.
The justification for this latest notion of binary continuing education for all, from the government’s perspective at least, seems to be, on the face of it, an economically functionalist one, barely disguised in the rhetoric of lifelong learning for the individual. Through the process of lifelong learning and the employment this will secure for us we will all gradually become middle class citizens. Within these developments debates continue and practitioners practice, juggling competing discourses in which the purpose of education is variously linked to notions of social progress, a just society, national economic competitiveness, and global ecological sustainability. We borrow from these premises in turn to justify the continued existence or the creation of our favoured educational projects, those to which we have committed ourselves or from which we cannot, for now, escape. So we alternatively privilege individual learning, individual self-interest, communities of learners, communities of interest, the ‘rights’ of certain communities to self-determination and so on. We define and try to create the learning organisation and the learning society. We witness the establishment of the University for Industry and query or embrace its genesis and remit. We witness or engage in the push towards particular expressions of regionalism in the United Kingdom. In Europe war rages in the former Yugoslavia, where a federal national identity has been unsustainable.
At different moments, I find the current status quo of adult and higher education in these wider contexts inevitable, distasteful, irrelevant, highly relevant, a cause for celebration, reclaimable. These different responses are influenced by the degree to which I personally feel secure, or not, engaged, proactive, enlightened and surprised; by my ability to identify and consort with perceived allies; by my capacity to digest criticism and accommodate challenge. It provokes in me a desire to articulate a purpose and a vision for myself as an adult learner, for adult learners I teach, and in order to reframe my research. It makes me nervous and wary of those who do just that. In order to articulate the spaces and shapes for learners and learning I want to defend and create, I seek a means by which to justify my perspectives and the means by which I can gather collaborators and supports for projects I cannot carry out alone.
Ideology, solidarity and self-interest
The outdated-ness of the notion of ideology was expressed eloquently by Rorty (1989) and was in turn fiercely reclaimed by Eagleton (1991), with an ensuing debate in the Radical Philosophy journal in the early nineties (Nos. 59,60,62). The relevance for me of this debate to the current status quo of lifelong learning is to better understand the emergence of the concept both from within the ‘liberationist’ tradition, and from the perspective of ‘social control by oppressive interests’. To take a simple example, what am I as both educator and learner, doing education and learning for? As a learner am I on a punitive treadmill attempting to keep abreast of all the new developments around me, doomed ultimately to fail unless I keep up just well enough to secure patronage and resources? Or am I hugely fortunate to live in an era where everyone expects me to gain access to lifelong learning opportunities? As an educator, am I part of the oppressive ‘class’, acting out society’s demands for an up to the mark work force? Or am I helping others acquire the means by which they can continue to grow, develop, understand, enjoy, make choices, make contributions they relish and can be proud of? Am I all of these things at the same time or at different moments?
The difference between Rorty’s and Eagleton’s perspectives is for me about the relationship between moral purpose and knowledge. Eagleton denies that ideology can only be conceived of if it is also held that there is some form of absolute truth wherein the language with which that ideology is articulated then becomes a representation. For Rorty, there is significant a change in emphasis. The process of education and learning will never result in a true and proper understanding of how, for example, people are or how society is. As history unfolds we do not get nearer to some ideal or even better state. In other words we can progress backwards as well as forwards.
The question or focus changes, therefore, from being concerned with moral progress as a journey from distorted to undistorted perceptions of reality, to a continuous process of ‘modifying our practices to take account of new descriptions of what has been going on.’ By dropping a representationalist account of knowledge, we pragmatists drop the appearance-reality distinction in favour of a distinction between beliefs which serve some purposes and beliefs which serve other purposes – for example, the purposes of one group and those of another group. (Rorty, 1991:4)
One can accommodate Eagleton’s view most easily if one agrees that ideology is still a political force because proponents of particular ideologies believe in absolute truths. It is hard, otherwise, to understand how any peoples, at one time living peacefully side by side, can commit atrocities to neighbours they once went shopping with. I certainly want to believe that perceived self/group interest can only stray so badly when held together with a collectivised vision of an absolute truth, and when that combination of perspectives is manipulated by unchallenged leaders in times of threat. To hold this view I don’t have to believe in absolute truths myself (though of course I may do) and neither does Eagleton.
The belief that a minority of theorists monopolise a scientifically grounded knowledge of how society is, while the rest of us blunder around in some fog of false consciousness, does not particularly endear itself to the democratic sensibility. A novel version of this elitism has arisen in the work of Richard Rorty, in whose ideal society the intellectuals will be ‘ironists’, practising a suitably cavalier, laid-back attitude to their own beliefs, while the masses, for whom such self-ironising might prove too subversive a weapon, will continue to salute the flag and take life seriously.
Different epistemologies, different times?
In times of peace and general well being I may or may not bother to challenge ideological perspectives I disagree with, even where I disagree fundamentally. These are times when there seems to be ‘space’ for all manner of ‘shapes’. But in times of conflict the space of certain individual or groups is encroached upon. The shapes which ‘fit’ are those which do not are dictated by dominant voices. In these times I may want to virulently oppose a particular ideology, especially when its effects on human behaviour are to my mind disagreeable or when I fear it may lead to inhuman consequences. The temptation, where time and the opportunity to negotiate are in short supply is to devise or adhere to a countervailing ideology, predicated on an equally weighty but opposing ‘absolute truth’. Indeed many day to day conversational arguments between people do just this. It is often a kind of short hand rather than a definite indicator of a representationalist stance.(Hegel’s concept of the dialectic offers a view of how we ‘think and talk’ this, whereas Marx’ notion of dialectical materialism attempts to embed the process in the ‘real’ history of society).
The question for me as an educator of others comes at the point where I chose, if indeed I do chose, to weave my own views and perspectives (and my ideology?) in to my teaching. Can I do otherwise? How then do I ‘educate’ others to think critically, including critically of me and my ideas. In the mid-70s I was involved in three different kinds of adult education within the health service in South London. In all of these endeavours I was also faced with issues of individual and collective expression of identity and interest.
The first was the management of classes from the LEA in the geriatric and psychogeriatric wards of a local hospital branch of a large teaching hospital, in South London. These classes, mostly in arts, crafts and music offered opportunities for individual expression. This was of some benefit to the individual but did not have much of an impact on his or her perceived ‘shape’ as a hospital patient, devoid of much personal power and most outward signs of individual identity. The second was a reminiscence project in the same hospital involving all levels of staff from cleaners to consultants. This was construed as a collaborative venture involving many patients and a cross section of staff from cleaners to consultants. Patients became the subjects of the oral history of the local community, and increasingly objects of interest to the staff involved. The third was the training of shop stewards in a period within which I was a union representative during Callaghan’s ‘winter of discontent’. The educational purpose here was to prepare stewards to take up more ‘space’ in discussions with the hospital management about the utilisation of scare resources and the deployment of their fellow workers. A sense of class solidarity became very tangible when the threatened closure of a sister hospital led to the formation of a joint shop stewards committee.
Looking back, I am aware of the strong ideological influences upon me as I planned and collaborated with others around these activities. I am also aware of the unexpected learning I encountered and how, subtly, my ideological stance was not so much undermined as held to one side, my view widened, with increasingly complex and at the time, uncategorisable experiences. This led me to conclude at the time that I should hold on to my beliefs and values rather more loosely, for fear that if I did not, I would be missing out on some important insights I might otherwise have not made room for. This did not involve a total jettisoning of those beliefs and values, but rather a widening of the mental ‘screen space’ in which they featured.
One of the insights gained during this time was that there was a significant difference in educating people for the process of claiming their due share of power, and educating them to use power ‘well’ when they have it. When Eagleton said:
Are socialism and feminism ideologies, and if not why not? Are they non-ideological when in political opposition but ideological when? When they come to power?’ (Eagleton, 1991:6)
He was expecting us to agree that this could not be the case because it was illogical. But my answer would be that it is a perfectly plausible view. The ‘right’ to power neither gives people guidance how to use it once achieved nor does it dictate how it is used. The process of acquiring power once withheld changes people’s perceptions of all kinds of things including of course themselves. In democracies, so-called feminists or socialists who are seen as achieving power either do this as representatives of others who are still not powerful, or as tokens. The mass of others whose position has not changed can be in an even worse position than before because there has been the appearance of much change when only a little has taken place. For examples one has only to look at speed with which New Labour jettisoned the socialist tag in the late 90s.
It therefore strikes me that Rorty’s view that ideology is dead (if that is indeed what he claimed; Eagleton seems to think he did) deserves equally serious consideration for its benefits and disadvantages as an epistemology. He suggests we have moved on to a different way of understanding of how we arrive at collective solidarity, when we do, through the tentative contingency of negotiated me and occasionally patronising stance, but that does not make it any more or less valid.
With luck, we happy few, the good and enlightened vanguard, will mould those subordinated groups into an instrument for the purposes we think they ought to have” (Rorty, 1991:42)
I can only gauge the extent to which it illuminates areas of ‘darkness’ for me in my understandings of how people learn, how we teach and above all, why we do both of these things.
In the late 80s and early 90s I was involved in the piloting of the first versions of National Vocational Qualifications in Social Care in a Social Services Department in the north of England. The potential candidates were home helps and residential care assistants working with older people. There were strenuous ‘ideological’ objections to NVQs from some quarters and strong interest in their support from others including the manual workers trade unions. The latter were keen on the grounds that this was the only opportunity many of their members would get for the formal recognition of workplace learning. My own resistance to this ‘functionalist’ approach to learning was therefore softened by my realisation that the antagonism expressed by those of us with plenty of academic qualifications to our name and in middle class professions, was experienced as an elitist ‘put down’ by colleagues doing some of the toughest and least well paid work in the department.